Obama's not budging on executive action

President Barack Obama is not backing down from his pledge to take executive action on immigration before the year is over, despite the political beating that his party suffered in Tuesday’s midterms.

Obama backed off a promise to take unilateral action by the end of the summer following pressure from several red-state Senate Democrats concerned about the political impact on their reelection campaigns. Many of those senators, including Sen. Kay Hagan of North Carolina and Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas, lost their reelection bids Tuesday.

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“Before the end of the year, we’re gonna take whatever lawful actions that I can take that I believe will improve the functioning of our immigration system, that will allow us to surge additional resources to the border where I think the vast majority of Americans have the deepest concern,” Obama said in a news conference Wednesday.

He added that he’ll be reaching out to incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, as well as Democratic leaders, to gauge whether lawmakers want to proceed on immigration legislation, either in the lame-duck session or next year.

But “what I’m not going to do is just wait,” Obama said. “I think it’s fair to say that I’ve shown a lot of patience and done the work on a bipartisan basis as much as possible and I’m going to keep on doing so. But in the meantime, let’s figure out what we can do lawfully through executive action to improve the functioning of the existing system.”

Obama added that if Congress sends him an immigration bill that he can sign, that would supercede any executive actions he plans to take. He declined to go into the specifics of executive actions.

Republicans have already warned Obama against acting on his own on immigration — at a news conference just before Obama spoke, McConnell said executive action on immigration from Obama would be “like waving a red flag in front of a bull.”

“I have no doubt that there will be some Republicans who are angered or frustrated by any executive action that I may take,” Obama answered when asked about McConnell’s remark at the press conference. “Those are folks, I just have to say, who are also deeply opposed to immigration reform in any form, and blocked the House from being able to pass a bipartisan bill.”